ACTION; M, 2hr 22min
STARRING: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx
Double life: Garfield and Stone
From the word go, director Marc Webb is all over the map with his jazzy sequel to 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man. Bang! A private jet crashes and burns. Boom! Spider-Man, aka Peter Parker (Garfield), untangles a Manhattan traffic snafu, stage-managed by a Russian lunatic (Paul Giamatti). Bung! Peter and cutie gf Gwen Stacy (Stone) split. (Or do they? Say it ain’t so!) Boo! Mouseburger electrical engineer Max Dillon (Foxx), an employee, like Gwen, of nefarious techno-giant Oscorp, is royally zapped with a gazillion volts while fixing an on-the-fritz connection inside the monolithic Oscorp HQ. He emerges from this horrible experience as radioactive Electro, whose explosive presence is a megawatt and visually outrageous worry.
In related news, Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan), Peter’s buddy from way back, and Oscorp’s new head boy, has returned to New York with terminal problems, and fetchingly geeky college grad Peter still lives in cosy suburbia with his doting Aunt May (Field). So, yep, there are a bunch of whirling balls in the air. But the biggie, as always, is right vs wrong, complete with white-hot spectacle, hellacious baddies and a true-love story of style and substance. All good!
